You have to be able to think in Mathematica, which takes some getting used to. If know what you're doing, you can write extremely expressive (and compact) code.

You have to be able to think in Mathematica, which takes some getting used to. If know what you're doing, you can write extremely expressive (and compact) code. I've seen demos by my lecturers and it's amazing what you can do in a few lines. It suffers a little from the same sort of thing as Python: there is almost certainly a canonical, beautiful way of doing what you want to do, but you're going to have to sift through documentation to find it.